Sunday, 5 July 2009

Jauntiness goeth before a tumble

It wasn't a big step, all things considered. Maybe two inches high. And it wasn't on a really big slope, either. I figured I could tackle it without a problem. The sun was shining through a canopy of trees, the birds were singing, Christopher Hitchens was accusing all religions of being child abusers on my headphones...I'd covered a lot of ground in forty-five minutes and could easily get home in another hour to sit down to breakfast with my wife. I felt a wave of good cheer spreading through my very being, so I stepped onto the step with a jaunty little leap, like Gene Kelly skipping away at the end of the Singing in the Rain routine...

and I missed it. Tumbled over. Fell on my arse. My ankle throbbed with pain but I had no phone, and therefore no choice but to hobble home. I hoped that it would recover overnight, but this morning it was even worse.

There was no choice but to go to hospital, to be told that I've torn a ligament in my right ankle and need to rest it for a couple of days and, if I must get up to use the toilet to hobble about on crutches. So now I'm stuck in the house, the wife is down in Birmingham on union business, I'm bored to death and my ankle hurts like buggery.

It was only a small step, only a mild slope, only a slight fall: but it fucked me up but good.

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AJ McKenna is a spoken word artist, but hopes to provoke you to disagree with her about that. Her poetry film 'A Letter to a Minnesota Prison' (commissioned by Apples & Snakes and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation)was shown at the South Bank Centre in 2013. In 2015 she premiered her one-woman show 'Howl of the Bantee' at the PBH Free Fringe in Edinburgh. A former Deputy Editor at So So Gay magazine, she now writes for Vada and Clarissa Explains Fuck All.